A systematic examination of the books is certainly one option. We could also try to track down the handful of owners (or their families) of the books that we have already looked at. We could try to find an insider – someone who works at the library – who is sympathetic and might be able to find out more about the still emerging story of the books. We could wait until May, when Benny Brunner’s film The Great Book Robbery is scheduled to be released, and see what further light is shed and what ideas it sparks.

We could do all this, but amidst it all, most important is to reassert that whether or not owners are identified, the AP books – as well as tens of thousands of other books that are embedded in the library’s general collection and thus harder to identify – are Palestinian books. They are individuals’ books, yes, but they are also Palestinian books in a collective sense.

After World War II, the workers at Offenbach Archival Depot in Germany did an incredible job of returning millions of books to their owners, but they also faced the question of what to do with the 500,000 or so unidentifiable books. Normally they would return them to the country or community that they were taken from, but when the Jewish population had been murdered or dispersed throughout the world, it seemed offensive to “return” the books to their countries of origin. So they embarked on a process of discussion in which they tried to be as accountable as possible to affected Jewish communities. The books ended up in libraries and Jewish cultural centers around the world, including some at the National Library in Jerusalem – the same place that now houses the AP books.

So when we consider the case of Palestine – which is uncannily similar at least in the sense of a population scattered throughout the world – we must ask ourselves the same questions. How can the books be “returned” to a Palestinian population with millions in exile? Who represents the Palestinian people? Should the books be housed in a governmental institution, a cultural NGO, a new library to be set up for this purpose? Should they be as close to Jerusalem as possible, or as far away from occupation as possible?

These are all issues I am eager to discuss with Palestinians. If you know folks whose families may have more insight into this, let me know. Next week (yes, February has 5 Wednesdays this year!) I’ll suggest resources for further education and activism about this issue and Palestine in general. And if you want to get a head start on the education and activism, check out all the events coming up for Israeli Apartheid Week. See you there!

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with an excerpt from the last part of my article:

In some ways, the importance of this story lies simply in its telling, and the AP books as a collection take on new meaning with each examination. Not only do they represent a more or less unintentional reminder of Israel’s theft of Palestinian cultural and intellectual property, but they are also a living archive with meaning in the relationship between and among the books and their owners. For example, while AP book owner Mohammad Nimer Al-Khatib was part of a number of groups specifically aligned with the famous Husseini clan, Dr. Yusuf Haikel, another AP book owner, “was considered to be an enemy of the traditional supporters of Haj Amin Al-Husseini, and a supporter of King Abdullah.” One might wonder how the books’ or the men’s relationship to each other changes within the context of a captive collection of looted books from six decades ago.

…

In July 1948, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion famously wrote in his diary about the Palestinian people, “The old will die and the young will forget.” The old may be dying, but the young are not forgetting. Under the surface of any interaction in or about Palestine lie the ghosts of the past, powerfully resurrected in a multitude of cultural heritage projects with one eye on the present and another looking towards the future. It is my hope that this study of the “Abandoned Property” books will contribute to an ongoing process of decolonization through memory and return.

When it came time to begin the practical side of my research, I posed the following question:

To what extent and in what ways can the books labeled “Abandoned Property” in the National Jewish Library at Hebrew University be linked to their prior Palestinian owners?

Since I was not scheduled to travel to Israel/Palestine during the months I was working on the project, I had to find someone else to gather data. An Israeli friend put me in touch with Kara, an American studying at Hebrew University, and she was amazing. On her first trip to the library, she spent hours requesting and then looking at just thirteen of close to six thousand books. The books are in closed stacks and their retrieval can take more than an hour. The slow pace of this kind of research and the care required with each volume made it clearer than ever that this study would be more qualitative than quantitative. However, it was also clear that the books provided a wealth of information, more than I had imagined (I had had a brief moment of fearing that we wouldn’t find anything at all). When all was said and done, Kara had examined (and photographed) thirty-four books, looking for stamps, signatures, and other markings that might indicate prior ownership. I looked through the photos she sent me and, with help from friends, translated the Arabic (likely from former owners) and Hebrew (mostly from librarians and researchers) into English.

Of the thirty-four books, only three books contained no markings. More than half contained request slips and check-out cards, at least some of which indicate that the books were once cataloged differently. Almost half contained librarians’ notes that provided more information than what was in the online catalog, further indicating a previous organizational system. A similar number contained marginalia, including everything from grammatical notes to guesses about the meaning of poetry to what appear to be simple doodles.

More telling were the books – about a quarter of them – that had owners’ names written in them. Several books belonged to Mohammad Nimr Al-Khatib, who a quick Google search will show you was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and Arab Higher Committee in Haifa in the 1940s. He survived a 1948 assassination attempt by the Haganah, the paramilitary organization that would later become the Israeli army. You may ask, how do we know that this is the same Mohammad Nimr Al-Khatib? Well, the timing is right, many of the books are religious in nature, and most of all, we found a dedication in one book reading, “Haj Abdel Fattah Al-Khatib Husseini for his son Mohammad Nimer” [see image on left above]. The Khatib of Haifa indeed had a father named Abdel Fattah.

It had been reported that the books of the influential Palestinian educator Khalil Sakakini were in the AP collection. Indeed, we found several books with either Khalil Sakakini’s name or that of his eldest son, Sari [see image on right]. In two books we also found the name of Dr. Yusuf Haikel, Yaffa’s last mayor before Israel’s occupation of the city in 1948. A smattering of lesser known people (at least to me and Google) also showed up in our study of these few dozen books. I can only imagine how many more names we would find if we were to examine all 6,000 books.

Last summer, after my research was technically over, I did go to the library and looked at a handful of books, some that Kara had viewed before and some that she hadn’t. It was incredible (if also both heartbreaking and infuriating) to touch these books, and quite tempting to leave the library with a page or two. Would the owners appreciate a page of their book back? Or would they rather the book remain intact in the hands of the occupier? This was not my decision to make, not now. I returned the books to the librarian who likely had no idea of their significance, and went on my way.

I returned to the library once again, this time with a Palestinian American woman who had contacted me to say, “I heard about your research. My grandfather was best friends with Khalil Sakakini and I think my grandfather’s books are also at Hebrew U. Will you help me find them?” We sat down together to look through the catalog, trying to request books somewhat strategically. Her grandfather read French, liked art, etc. Still, knowing no specific titles, we did not come across a book with her grandfather’s name in it. However, the very first book we opened together had the name “George Khamis,” to which my comrade said, “George! Let me tell you about George! He also drank tea every morning with my grandfather and Khalil Sakakini.”

These books have stories to tell, and I have only just scratched the surface.

While researching the Palestinian books now in Israeli custody, I looked at past examples of cultural property stolen during times of war and occupation. I was planning to use case studies from different times and places, but as I began to research Jewish property stolen by Nazis, I realized that there was a wealth of examples simply within that context.

The Nazi Holocaust, which happened only a few years before the Palestinian Nakba (and is not entirely unrelated), is one of the most studied cases of physical and cultural destruction of a people. I did not have to look far for stories of looted cultural property, and even books in particular, from Austria to Belarus, from the Czech Republic to Germany. The governments and museums of Austria and Germany, perhaps because they can be seen as the most culpable, have undergone incredible efforts in recent years to research the provenance (former ownership) of cultural property, and to return as much of it as possible. Belarus, on the other hand, has taken the stance that what is won in war is legitimately taken, and only recently has begun to distinguish a small fraction of the half million looted books in its national library as “rare books.”

For me, perhaps the most relevant parallel to the AP books that can be found in the cases of Nazi looting is the question of collective return to a community dispersed throughout the globe. The standards that existed before the Nazi Holocaust – that books and other property should be returned to their country of origin after a war – no longer made sense in places where the community of the former owners (in this case, mostly Jews) was decimated. Similarly, one must ask how to return books in which individuals’ names are not found to a Palestinian collective body with no clear representative or central location. More on this in a couple weeks, but for now, I’d like to tell a story I find particularly moving that I first came across in an article by Miriam Intrator. Like last week, I’ll quote from my article, and you can read the whole article here:

In 1941, the Nazis established Theresienstadt concentration camp in a town called Terezin on the outskirts of Prague. This camp housed wealthy and prominent Jews from various countries and served as a “model camp” to show the world that the Nazis’ treatment of Jews was humane. Therefore, those in the camp were, at least at the beginning, permitted many of the amenities not usually provided to concentration camp inhabitants.16 One such amenity was a community library and bookmobile.

Many people arriving in Theresienstadt brought books with them, and thus a collection was established. Nazi authorities soon supplemented this collection with libraries stolen from Jewish institutions throughout Europe. The books had no common language or subject, and were cataloged by professionals in the library. Eventually, the Nazis’ motivation for the operations in the library became much more insidious: Jews were to catalog materials for future inclusion in the “Museum of the Extinct Race.”17

Eventually, the vast majority of Theresienstadt residents were deported and killed. The head librarian and one other staff member survived, and voluntarily remained in the camp for three months after liberation until they could fully organize and catalog the 100,000 volumes in the library. The books then found their new home in the Jewish Museum in Prague.18

In the years immediately following World War II, the Jewish Museum in Prague underwent a massive process of restoring materials to their prior owners. Of more than 190,000 volumes that the museum acquired during and immediately after the war, 158,000 were returned.19 In 2000, the Czech Republic passed a restitution act that required all state institutions to return art obtained illegally between 1938 and 1945. Although not a state institution, the Jewish Museum committed itself to the spirit of the act and began provenance research on many of the items in its collection. Additionally, the museum has a section on its website called “Terms for the filing of claims for the restitution of books from the library collection of the Jewish Museum in Prague which were unlawfully seized from natural persons during the period of Nazi occupation.” Explaining that all books “shall be transferred free of charge to the natural person who owned them prior to the seizure,”20 the website lists specific instructions on how to file claims, which descendants and relatives may do so, and the documents required.

Thinking about this story both haunts and inspires me. I am amazed that the few surviving librarians stayed in the camp after they could have left in order to catalog the collection. In this act, as in the act of building the library and providing services to camp inhabitants, the librarians danced the fine line between submission and resistance. On the one hand, the librarians had been ordered to perform their job, both to make the camp look good and to begin work on the insidiously named “Museum of the Extinct Race.” On the other hand, the collection and maintenance of a library comprised of people’s most prized possessions, the operation of a bookmobile and encouragement to read for pleasure, the insistence on life in the midst of death – these are strongest kinds of resistance I know. I am reminded now of Palestinian spoken word artist Rafeef Ziadeh who, in response to people who ask her why Palestinians teach hate, declares, “We teach life, sir. We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir.”

A little about me: I’m a Saint Ann’s school librarian by day, a Palestine solidarity activist by night, and a leader of educational and activist delegations by summer (both day and night). So when I read this article and saw this film trailer, I thought, “I have to look into this more.” I decided to construct my Queens College MLIS thesis project around this story of thousands of Palestinian-owned books that ended up under Israeli control. Call it preservation or call it looting, but these books represent one of many examples of the appropriation of Palestinian cultural heritage into Israel’s conception of itself. In order to continue to deny Palestinian rights, most notably the internationally recognized right of refugees to return, Zionist institutions must take a Newt Gingrich-esque stance, desperately trying to deny the history of the Palestinian people and their claims to land and property.

I’ll let my thesis (or the article that came from it) tell the story of the books themselves:

In 1948, much of the wealthy and formally educated Palestinian population was concentrated in Jerusalem and other urban centers. When Zionist militias swept through these neighborhoods, they physically pushed thousands of people from their homes and caused tens of thousands more to flee in fear. Many Palestinians left in haste, grabbing only what they could carry as they ran. Others thought they would return a few weeks later, once the fighting died down. In many cases, members of the educated class left behind some of their most prized possessions: books.

The soldiers raiding these West Jerusalem neighborhoods were closely followed by teams of librarians from the Jewish National and University Library at Hebrew University (later referred to as National Jewish Library or simply the National Library). They gathered approximately 30,000 books from private Palestinian libraries and, according to testimonies from those involved in the project, began to catalog books by subject and often by owners’ names. In the early 1960s, however, close to 6,000 of the books were revisited and labeled with the letters “AP” for “abandoned property”. The library catalog shows no information on provenance, or former ownership. If that information had formerly been recorded, it seems to have been erased or at least carefully concealed.

To this day, the books’ call numbers begin with the letters “AP.” The National Library has thus maintained a likely unintentional collection of looted Palestinian books, easily identifiable to those who understand what “AP” means. It remains unclear why certain books were labeled “AP” and others were not. Indeed, the remainder of the 30,000 plundered books, which were embedded into the library’s general catalog and are also still housed there, are much more difficult to identify.

As you can tell, we are only just cracking the surface of this episode, and there are a lot of questions. But for the purpose of my research, I focused on just a handful of books from the 6,000 labeled “AP.” I wanted to see if there was a way to trace specific books to specific owners by looking for names, stamps, and other identifying information inside the books themselves. Like with everything I do, my goal was not simply to contribute to scholarly research, but to be a part of a larger movement for justice. To that end, it is important to me to emphasize that whether or not we can connect individual books to their owners, there should be a collective return of this cultural property to the Palestinian people. How is that to be done? Well, that’s for another time.

A sneak preview of the weeks to come: Next week, I will look at examples of Jewish cultural property looted by Nazis, and the ways in which that property has or hasn’t been returned. The following week, I’ll talk more about the details of my own research and what I found in the books in Jerusalem. The final week, I’ll discuss recommendations for follow-up and further activism. If you just can’t wait, you can read it all in a slightly more official form here. And if your comments steer us in a different direction, well then, off we will go.

I don’t know if you guys get this as well, but in my encounters with non-librarians, there are one of two reactions to my occupation: reallly excited, or confusion/looks of pity. The former group of people are awesome and understand the importance of libraries. The latter group, whom I encounter on a weekly basis, picture libraries in the same way that the movie It’s a Wonderful Life does – as sad, lonely places where otherwise normal people are transformed into lifeless, husband-less freaks.

Just two weeks ago, after my dentist asked me what I do for a living, I got this reaction, which is now one of my favorites: “Really? You don’t look boring enough to be a librarian!” And then he grinned, as if this were a compliment.

He’s still a good dentist so I have decided to overlook it. Oral health is very important. But my point is, why do librarians get so little respect? Our budgets are constantly being cut, branches closed, and no one outside our profession thinks of it as a profession at all, or realizes a master’s degree in library science even exists.

I suspect that most of this problem is an issue of marketing. We librarians do not tout our own accomplishments enough. We don’t toot our own horns, as it were. But I wonder if another factor here stems from library school. Is it strenuous enough? For people going into the academic arena – does library school do enough to prepare us for high-level scholarship? I’m personally not sure. Library school programs seem to place little emphasis on publishing, library instruction, or the business of managing a library and staff – some of the most important aspects of our actual jobs. If anyone has any thoughts/gripes about this, please leave them in the comments – I’m very curious to hear about people’s experiences!

He’s kind of disparaging about the logo in his presentation, but I just love it! L!brary. Anywho, it’s a very funny talk and also underscores some of the important aspects of library design and who it’s for (bit of a spoiler: it’s for us!).

Books Through Bars Annual Bingo Fundraiser (!!!)

Join Books Through Bars NYC for our annual Bingo Fundraiser.

WHEN: Saturday Jan. 28^th. Doors open @ 7pm

WHERE: The Brecht Forum – 451 West Street (that’s the West Side Highway) between Bank & Bethune Streets
Featuring SISTER LOUD MELISSA and DJ Lena

__________________

Prizes include gift certificates and treats from: Angelika Cinema, Anthology film archives, Babycakes, Book Thug Nation, Bluestockings, Criterion Films, Earth First Journal!, the IFC Center, the Feminist Press, the New Press, and many more!

Free entry; $1 per card to play. Beverages will be available. ALL PROCEEDS used to buy postage to send free books to prisoners.

http://booksthroughbarsnyc.org/

The Brecht Forum is accessible by A, C, E, 1, 2, 3 trains.

Ah, library signage. A quick image search confirms, signage-wise, libraries are the worst. We are the place where Comic Sans and clip art goes to die, and where one mark of punctuation is seen as far too polite, or too timid, to really get a message across.

This BuzzFeed article from a year ago on passive aggressive library signs pretty much sums it up. I do not think any other institution has succeeded in being so offensive to graphic design. But the underlying frustration for librarians, and especially public librarians, is that people actually do chew on their headphone cords. Signage like “Do not put trash or food in the book drop” is sadly warranted.

But the worst part is that for all of our all-caps, bold, overly punctuated efforts, computer generated signs are largely ignored and ineffective.

So what do we do about our signage design issues? I think one best practice would be to never use scotch tape to affix a sign to anything ever again. It looks awful and leaves so much moldering, tape-y residue when the sign is inevitably taken down.

Plus there are so many better options available. At the New School’s Fogelman Library, for instance, where I currently spend a good deal of time, information is painted directly onto the walls, like so:

It looks great and professional, and most importantly, seems to be effective at reducing directional library questions. Other options are magnetized signs, wall decals, foam core, or at the very least plastic information holders.

Another consideration is sign placement – what is the flow of traffic through the library, and where will signage be most visible? I think a lot of our signage is ineffective because we have not addressed the flow of traffic and the sight lines of our patrons.

This study by the Metropolitan Library System in Chicago addresses some of these problems and more, and has some great summaries in their key findings, including one fundamental concept that I believe a lot of librarians have trouble accepting – “Don’t try to change people’s behavior: identify it and design for it.”

In a user-centered library, this is key. Attempting to get users to change their behavior is a waste of energy and often does not work. It is much more effective to identify how our patrons are already using the library and then build around that.

And lastly, it would be great if most library signage had a graphic identity or theme, created by a person who knows at least a little bit about graphic design. Some library signage is absolutely painful to look at, and we are better than Comic Sans!

Hello and Happy New Year, Desksetters! My name is Katherine Boss, Reference and Instruction Librarian at Long Island University Brooklyn, and I will be your guest blogger for January.

So let’s talk about academic library instruction. It seems that instruction is becoming more of a focus for both public and academic libraries, which makes sense, as databases continue to be intimidating megamalls of information that few of our students can navigate. Yet a lot of undergraduates approach library instruction as a waste of their time, since obviously they plan on Googling the answers to all of their research questions on their smartphones one day before their assignment is due.

I assume you are all properly horrified. As librarians, we strive to turn this ship around – there is so much information in the world that is not available on Google! Information that students are already paying for, via their tuition. Yet engaging a group of unresponsive Business Management 101 freshmen can be a daunting challenge – especially when most of them are vastly more interested in liking things on Instagram than learning about the (many!) ways to create company lists and sort them by sales in LexisNexis. So how do we get the attention of our students, and stuff them full of as much information literacy as possible?

Well, I do not pretend to have all the answers, since I have not been teaching all that long, but I am very, very interested in this question, and have some thoughts. First off, I advise lecturing as little as possible. “Wait- WHAT?” you are perhaps saying. “Don’t most students straight-up love lectures?”

Evidence suggests the answer is: no. I say this based on failed instruction sessions that I will refrain from re-living here, and also, studies. This report on NPR, summarizing a study by a pair of physicists at Arizona State, confirms what many teachers have known for a long time: active and engaging teaching styles result in higher information retention. Lectures reinforce passive learning, and while a bit of lecturing is usually necessary at some point during a 50-min instruction session, I try to avoid it.

Instead, I like to consider ways to get students to implement the research methods I want them to learn. Often this requires a good bit of advance planning, group activities, games, and what not, but once you’ve done enough preparation and have a general structure, the sessions themselves can be very unstructured, since so much of it is up to the students. And here I will plug my favorite, FAVORITE podcast, “Adventures in Library Instruction,” available for free on the web and through iTunes.

I have gotten so many great ideas from this podcast, which is produced by the very talented and hilarious librarians Rachel Borchardt, Jason Puckett, and Anna Van Scoyoc. One workshop in particular I like to use is a version of MythBusters, wherein each student or pair of students pulls a statement or question from a hat, and spends 15 minutes on Academic Search Premier or some such database determining whether the statement is confirmed, plausible, or busted. It’s usually a good idea to gather your myths or questions from the same database, to keep the focus narrow, and also to demo a myth in front of the class first, to give them an idea of how they might approach it. Then, toward the end of the class, each group of students can talk briefly about their findings, how they got there, what worked, what didn’t, and so on. This format can easily be adapted to any academic discipline – business, history, science, etc.

So if you’re interested in instruction I highly recommend the Adventures in Library Instruction podcast, you will come away with so many great ideas and a renewed enthusiasm for teaching. Also, Anna Van Scoyoc if you ever come across this blog post – thank you forever for your stories about the senior center. Those seniors will appreciate Twitter someday!!

"Merrymakers in New Year Saturnalia" Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York

As the year draws to an end, we  devote our last installment here at the Desk Set to a look back at some of our favorite aural discoveries made since our project began. Last week, Haley highlighted our very beloved Mayor La Guardia, and this week I will point you to some of our other gems.

We start with the very first audio we posted to our blog, Annotations. This post, titled “Eisenhower Salutes!” features two short excerpts from the three-hour coverage of the Eisenhower Day Parade celebrating General Eisenhower’s return to the United States  following the May 7 surrender of German forces. On June 19, 1945, four million New Yorkers gathered in the rain to welcome General Eisenhower to New York. Listen to the palpable excitement of the crowds gathered along Fifth Avenue waiting to catch a glimpse of the American hero.

Many of our favorite pieces brought to light important historical figures and movements we previously didn’t know about. The heroic story of the Four Chaplains of the USAT Dorchester, and the successful passing of the landmark Ives-Quinn Anti-Discrimination Bill are just two such examples.

Not all of our favorites are serious. In fact, many of our most loved artifacts are rather silly. Thanks to the youth-oriented radio featured on WNYC in the 1940s and 50s we have such hits as “Television (In My House)” from The Junior Journal program and “Please No Squeeze the Banana” courtesy of the Pals of the P.A.L., not to mention our very favorite water conservation jingle, which reminds listeners that “Water is precious as gold today, and no one ever throws gold away!”

We’d like to extend a special thanks to The Desk Set for letting us share the WNYC collection with you and wish everyone a very happy New Year! Follow our finds over at Annotations and don’t miss out on Mayor La Guardia’s wisdom on Twitter. Also, keep an eye out for our forthcoming WNYC online collections portal!

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.